Inequality turning U.S. into a horror show

In my opinion: Words alone won’t restore the American dream

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – A prominent American personality gave an impassioned speech against economic inequality recently that mourned the death of the American dream amid the widening gap between rich and poor.

The president’s speech was worthy, well crafted, no doubt heartfelt, but pretty much devoid of passion. And it fell apart when it came to solutions and of course it is solutions you want from a president, not diagnostics. Watch Obama’s speech.

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David Simon at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas

The impassioned speech I’m talking about was given last month in Sydney, Australia, by David Simon, the award-winning writer and producer of the HBO series “The Wire,” and other hit television shows. Read an edited version of Simon’s speech.

Simon, who was born in Washington and lives in Baltimore, was speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, an annual forum for thinking outside the box. Watch Simon’s speech.

The writer and longtime journalist referred to his country as a “horror show.”

“America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics,” Simon told his audience in the Sydney Opera House. “There are definitely two Americas.”

Simon — who chronicled the life of drug dealers in Baltimore and the corruption of the city’s public institution in five seasons of what many consider the best television ever produced — spelled out the consequences of the widening gap between rich and poor.

“And so in my country you’re seeing a horror show,” he said. “You’re seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you’re seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You’re seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind.”

But this diagnosis was not Simon’s dangerous idea. Rather, Simon said that Karl Marx, who got the final evolution of society all wrong, was right about one thing in his diagnosis of capitalism — there must be a social corrective to enforce the principle that there are things more important than profit.

Given the hysteria that usually comes with the mere mention of He Who Shall Not Be Named, Simon immediately issued a number of disclaimers.

“I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century,” he said. “That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.”

It was a social compact that got the country out of the Depression in 1932, and unless we find a similar solution now, Simon said, “somebody’s going to pick up a brick.”

Nor is Simon optimistic that brick-throwing can be avoided, given that the political process, which was the key to previous efforts to bring the country together, has been subverted.

“The last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans,” Simon told the international audience. “Right now capital has effectively purchased the government.”

Obama, already considered a Marxist by many in the country, can’t go citing Karl Marx in any context, so in his speech he sticks with Adam Smith, making the point that even the “father of free-market economics” believed, in effect, “if you work hard, you should be able to make a decent living.”

But Obama’s (long) catalogue of prescriptions to remedy this problem comes across sometimes as a self-serving laundry list of the baby steps his administration has taken to fight this tide.

In addition to obvious solutions like raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance and maintaining food stamps, the president champions a reduction in corporate taxes, a “trade agenda” that “works for the middle class,” and “streamlining regulations that are outdated” — all of which sounds suspiciously like the tired corporate agenda we have heard from “centrists” for some time.

As to the deficit hysteria in Washington, Obama says “we should not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago,” even though it was Obama and his administration who willingly engaged in that fruitless and misguided debate.

The president pleads for protection of the “golden years” of senior citizens even after he has repeatedly offered to reduce Social Security benefits by linking them to a measure of inflation divorced from real life.

David Simon is a gadfly whose powerful dramas have brought home the real-life desperation of many people, but who cannot himself deliver any solutions.

Obama’s long-winded speech on inequality, meanwhile, seems less like a call to action or an exercise of presidential leadership than a half-hearted reading of worthy ideas into the record. The horror that distresses Simon is not evident.

It might be enough for a TV producer to talk, but it’s not enough for a president.

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